Intellectual Disability in a Post-Neoliberal World

This book suggests and promotes new paradigms for intellectual disability. Challenging the predominant neoliberal agenda, it combines extensive clinical experience, conceptual analysis, and recent research. The authors explore the way that promotion of autonomy and choice overlooks the fundamentally relational needs of people with intellectual disabilities by examining four significant, repeating themes. What neoliberal policies are and how they suffocate innovation; the recurring scandals that characterise ID services in all cultures; the counter-intuitive belief that behavioural interventions can somehow address emotional distress; and fundamental tensions in the relationship between parents and services. Each chapter proposes alternative and hopeful ways to address the 40% of people with intellectual disabilities whose distress generates challenges for parents and staff. Written primarily for intellectual disability researchers, professionals, service managers, and policy-makers, this book constitutes a useful reading also for scholars in psychology, psychiatry and nursing, as well as specialist historians, geographers, sociologists, and social anthropologists engaged with intellectual disabilities.

Chapter 1: Why Ideas Matter.- Chapter 2: Noticing Neoliberalism.- Chapter 3: A New Lens on Care Scandals.- Chapter 4: Helping People Who Become Distressed: Attachment and Psychomotor Therapy.- Chapter 5: Reshaping the Way Parents and Services Relate.- Chapter 6: The Purpose of Exploration is to Arrive Back Where We Started and Know it for the First Time.

Jennifer Clegg is Adjunct Professor at La Trobe University, Australia, where she developed and taught for four years the course 'Non-behavioural Approaches to Challenging and Complex Needs' for their Masters in Disability Studies. For 25 years she was both an Associate Professor and Clinical Psychologist in Nottingham, UK, carrying out research and clinical intervention with distressed adults who have intellectual disability and their parents and staff. She has published 48 peer-reviewed articles, nine book chapters and two books: Critical Issues in Clinical Practice (SAGE, 1998), and New Lenses on Intellectual Disabilities (Routledge, 2020).

Richard Lansdall-Welfare worked as a Clinical Director and Consultant Psychiatrist in Nottinghamshire, UK, with adults who have intellectual disability and their families. His practice was both community and in-patient based, and involved the full-range of mental health difficulties experienced by this group. He implemented specialist services for those with additional needs such as epilepsy, nutritional difficulties and complex neurodevelopmental conditions, also contributing to service modelling at national and international level. He has published 10 peer-reviewed articles.